This Is Not A Bowie Reference

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This week I quit my job.

“Why? Why am I doing this?” I keep asking myself those questions. It’s strange that I just don’t know.

I’ve been with the company for thirteen years. Thirteen! I’d never had a job past a few years prior to landing the gig. And it was my first real world big-pants professional job. It was also in a field that I wanted to be in. It was a career. It was stability when, at the time, I was sitting right at poverty level.

It saved my life.

I started as a web designer right as the dot com bubble reached its apex. Within a year the bubble burst and all of those cool stories about how fun it was to work for a software company you heard in the ’90s passed into legend. No more parties, no more work trips, no more sushi in the break room. The economy mostly tanked and people were laid off. 9/11 happened and the economy tanked. More people were laid off. There was a recession and yet more people were let go. The housing market took a dump and the economy tanked yet again. All the while, my division had been made not just viable but necessary to the company as a whole. I got really really lucky.

So now I’m quitting. Why? What is so awful about the job that I should leave? I sit in relative comfort, in front of a huge monitor, with a view of trees (and a parking lot). There’s no physical labor and no one will die if I make a mistake. Stress is minimal (or what you make of it) and the personal growth has been fantastic. So… why?

It’s really a lot of things. Whenever someone quits (or at least when I have quit a job in the past) the assumption is that they’re unhappy. But I’m not unhappy. I’m not angry. There’s no middle finger in the air and a “take this job and shove it” bumper sticker on my car. I’m just not… happy.

I’m not happy with the way management works. I’m not happy with the way upper-management works. I’m not happy with the way upper–upper-management works. I feel like I’ve stated every case, made every argument, and dropped every hint that I wanted something more. Or at least I wanted something to change. And that seems to have either sailed over the heads of my up-line or they themselves felt powerless to do anything. If you can’t expect those you’ve worked with for years to champion your cause or believe in you, who will?

As an employee, you shouldn’t have to ask yourself this question. “Who is on my side? Who will approve this raise request? Who has the pull to do anything about recognizing my years of work, dedication and passion if not my immediate supervisors?”

It also comes down to respect. Respect for the discipline of the producers. Respect for the product. Respect for the customer. Without any of those things, any company should not expect to succeed. Or at the very least, the company should not expect to keep talented people. If mediocrity is a benchmark for your development team, then that’s just not for me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no rock-star. I’m an artist who enjoys immersive tech. I have opinions about things that other people also have opinions about. The difference is that I don’t speak at conferences. I don’t write articles. I don’t subscribe to methodologies like they’re the new Atkins diet. I don’t preach. I’m not even that much of a whiz-bang visual designer.

I don’t code especially quickly. I have to look up the star hack to remind me of the formatting. I still don’t use a lot of pseudo selectors just because I haven’t had to. I don’t know how to properly use media queries. There are few moments where I say “Hey! Why don’t I use this really obscure but effective strategy or property and that will solve all of the problems!” No – there’s none of that. Sometimes I don’t even have a good grasp on all of the requirements and how they impact every single business unit in the company.

But I’m still better than some.

So I’m quitting my job. I’ll miss it. I’ll miss the people most of all. And I’ll miss the 30″ monitor and window cube.

Ugly

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Last night, my girlfriend and I were driving through town for some dinner when I spied up ahead two cyclists riding two-abreast down the same three lane street I was on. Approaching them from behind, I saw the first rider speed up and disappear into traffic. The second hung back a bit.

The road narrowed to two lanes for construction and I found myself behind the second cyclist in the center lane. He was a thin lad in black, wearing a Chrome-style backpack and carrying a U-Lock at his waist. Me, being the cycling kinda guy, gave him some room and in general tried to not be a dick motorist. The second cyclist moved to the far right lane and I passed him, only to stop in the left turn lane when the road returned to three lanes. The light at the intersection was red.

Ahead I saw that the first cyclist had also stopped for the light and was talking to the driver of a grey pick-up truck in the far right lane. I was several cars back in the queue but I could see that the first cyclist was pissed off. What I assumed was talking was really yelling.

“Oh shit – here’s some road rage” I said. My girlfriend asked what happened but I could not say. I only assumed that the driver of the truck had come too close or tried to hit the riders. But who knows, really.

From behind, the second rider appeared. He swooped past the trucks rear and smashed the driver’s side tail light of the truck with his u-lock. The light popped and plastic showered the street. The trucks alarm or impact sensor (dunno which) went off in pain.

The second cyclist paused for a second and then took a hard left, cutting across the middle lane and far left turn lane against the light. The first cyclist finished yelling with the pick-up truck driver and followed his partner, fleeing the scene.

The truck driver, perhaps finally realizing that his vehicle had been assaulted, squealed the trucks tires and also cut across the waiting traffic to pursue the cyclists. By the time the light turned, and I was able to make my turn down the same street, everyone was gone. I circled the block, much to my girlfriend’s dismay, to see if I could find the truck or the cyclists. What was I going to do? I don’t know – but I didn’t want to see anyone get murdered.

We couldn’t find them, so we went about our way, still rather shocked by the whole thing and not knowing really what to do. Our town is pretty quiet and the urban cyclists are few. I haven’t heard of this sort of thing happening on our streets, but I just may not hang out in the right circles.
It disturbed me because just an hour before, I’d finished my daily bike commute home from work. I had been on my bike, riding through the same city streets, thinking how different everything looked from the bike than from behind the wheel.

Things look incredibly different now. Stay safe out there, everyone.

CSS Commenting For Clarity

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If you find yourself lost in the myriad of div’s and don’t s of CSS, having to refer back to your source HTML just to see where the heck you are in the structure, try this…

As you comment your CSS (which you’re doing, right?), break your CSS into chunks by grouping your CSS definitions by object type. That part should be a no-brainer.

/* Header */

From there, give yourself a nice short-hand reference to the objects in your HTML.


/* Header */
/* header > div#container > div#navigation > .tab > ul > li.foo > a.foo */

Now, you can just look up a few lines and see how the HTML is structured and define away! Ta-da!

Sure, this can add some kilobytes to your file size, and the document structure may change. But it could save you, and anyone else some trouble down the road. And yes, I’ve thrown in some HTML5 just to be complete in my example.

Hah!

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I knew this stuff would come back to haunt me. I’m going through some artwork from high-school/college.

I knew where it was and I knew what it was but I wasn’t sure I remembered how awful it was.